Tag: war

Twozdaz Theme Music

Howdy, sports fans. It’s Twozda, September 9, 2025. 62 degrees F holds forth in Ashlandia. Marbled clouds headline the moment. Never fear: it’s going to move to 69 degrees F by the day’s end, although we may need to navigate more thunder and rain while we get there. Feels like autumn has got its dandruff up and is out to end summer’s hold on Ashland.

Yesterday early afternoon found us with a huge downpour. People rushed into the coffee shop bursting with news about how intense, sudden, and cold the rain was. Brief was added to its description as the rain ceased after ten relentless minutes.

Then, 2:30 AM. A sound is covering the house. My sleepy mind thought it was a giant fan. Asking, what fan is that, I roamed through the house and realized, that giant fan sound was rain hissing down with Biblical efforts. I returned to bed and sleep only to awaken a while later to my wife in the kitchen getting water.

A sharp, high squeal noise had awakened me. I asked my wife if she’d heard it. “It’s raining,” she said.

I listened. “It stopped.”

“No, it’s still going.”

Papi and I went out back to prove the rain was stopped. It was. Cool breezes swept by with friendly helloes. Moonlight bright enough to walk on broke out. Rain clouds were splitting up and racing away in different directions, leaving a starry dark gray feast for my eyes. “This is nice,” I said. Papi didn’t disagree.

After I was back in bed, a sound like a brassy chord being strong on an electric guitar awakened me. “What the hell was that?” The Neurons asked the dark room. Nobody was giving any answers about noises.

Dad remains hospitalized. Not much can be done about a fractured pelvis. He’s due to be moved to a rehab center today. Andy is also being moved to a rehab center to help him recover from his hip fracture. Sis is mum about her medical procedure and its results.

Gritting my teeth and swallowing my GRRRRR, I peruse the news. Trump is suing the WSJ and anyone attached to the story about his ‘alleged’ birthday card/notes to Epstein. I’m sure Trump is betting that the story will be withdrawn and apologies issues. Meanwhile, he donated the Bible his mother presented to him in his boyhood to a Bible Museum. The net responded with laughter and mocking about the Bible. Most doubt that Trump opened his Bible, read it, and went to church, except for publicity when it suited his needs.

More attacks have been carried out in several wars. None of the war reporting arrives with a sense that the fighting is going to end soon. The major aggressors, Russia and Israel, are well past reasonable lines about their intentions. All can see that Russia will not stop until it has Ukraine. Israel won’t stop until Hamas are all dead. Neither nation displays concern or empathy for the innocents they’re killing.

Economic news will take over today’s media top spots. 911,000 fewer jobs were created between April 2024 and March 2025, BLS says. US job growth through March was significantly weaker than previously thought. Economists and analysts are telling us that it means the jobs markets was even worse than realized. A large downward revision was expected, with many citing sampling errors resulting from declining survey responses, weaker-than-inferred job creation at new firms, and adjustments related to asylum-seekers and other undocumented workers. The pandemic’s impact on the global labor market and residual adjustments were also blamed. Trump’s WH thinks that it proves Trump was right, the Biden economy was a disaster, and the BLS reporting is broken. That’s certainly puzzling, isn’t it: the Trump Regime is depending on a system they claim is broken to prove they’re right. Classic MAGAt non-thinking.

All this has culminated in The Neurons’ song choice for my morning mental music stream. It stormed in Ashland, with more storms coming. Trump is riding a storm of criticism about Jeffrey Epstein. We the People are riding through the storm of data about what’s going on with the economy. Hence, The Neurons summoned The Doors and “Riders on the Storm”.

Coffee has dropped in for an extended visit. May grace and peace visit and stay with us all for a while. Here we go again. Cheers

3

Mundaz Theme Music

Autumn is toddling in, dragging cooler air over us. Wildfire smoke adds a gauzy layer to tamp down temperatures. 68 F, clouds scuff up the blue sky. Thunderstorms are expected to drop in, and the temperature will top at a cordial 75 F. This is Munda, September 8, 2025. Our air quality is moderate, hovering in the 90s.

Dad is in the hospital in Texas, going through tests and assessments to see what can be done about his condition. Mom is okay at home, it seems, coming across as feisty in her texts. Steve is in hospice with multiple myeloma. Andy is recovering in the hospital from his surgery and getting ready to begin physical therapy. Sis is going into the hospital for a ‘medical procedure’ today. Telling me via text yesterday that she wasn’t well, she remained vague about what her medical procedure was for. I see my doctor tomorrow. Sounds like friends and family medical week.

The latest unexpected shock to the system politically has the Roberts Court again supporting Trump. Yes, it’s a real *gasp* moment. The ruling allows ICE to randomly patrol and pick up people based on whatever the fuck motivates those actions that day. It’s the Trump MAGALand way. MAGAts are applauding it. One said in comments on an article, “As an American I think that ICE and any law enforcement officer enforcing our immigration laws and detaining and having any and all illegal people regardless of race or nationality, is exactly what they should be doing, and we support them 100%.” Except, yawn, ‘Old Patriot Guy’, they’re not enforcing laws; they’re enforcing Executive Orders. Due process isn’t being followed. But that’s okay with OPG and others like him. Ends justify the means. To them, everyone ICE picks up is an illegal and needs to be kicked out. Like how he shifted from ‘I, American’ to ‘we’ by his comment’s end. Was that a slip of the royal we subconsciously thrust in there? Of course, MAGAts consistently demonstrate narrow focus and shallow thinking. OPG might be applauding and waving his flag over Trump’s ICE disappearing people without due process, but you can bet that his comments will change if he and his get struck. He’ll probably then whine, “What happened to innocent until proven guilty?” We know that in Trump’s U.S., that only applies to PINO TACO himself.

Meanwhile, Trump has again opted for fiction to support his decisions and policies. Has to be so for PINO Trump, if you think about it; truth, logic, reality, honor, and history all stand firmly against him. Since Trump brought it up, how much will longer we need to endure Trumpocalypse? Nine months into 2025, it’s already too much.

Trump Angrily Tells Reporter His Own Truth Post Is ‘Fake News’

Today’s music is for Rick Davies, Supertramp member and songwriter. He passed at 81 after losing to cancer. The Neurons and I agreed to play 1974’s “Bloody Well Right” in the morning mental music stream in honor and memory of Rick Davies.

Hope peace and grace sniff you out and give you help as needed today. Coffee has made a splash in my body. And it’s off to the races we go. Cheers

0

Twozdaz Wandering Political Thoughts

It’s one of those days when I read the news and let out slow air. First, the quake in Afghanistan. Only five miles deep, it killed over 800 at first count, and they’re still counting. Then the Sudan mudslide which was said to kill thousands. Sorry to read about all that pain and misfortune. I wish and hope for the best for the survivors. Will the U.S. send aid? Under previous administrations, that was almost a certainty. Under PINO TACO, it’s far less likely.

personnelente shared several links today. personnelente always offers links with interesting news and opinions. In this case, it was the Army Times taking up the issue of Trump deploying troops to cities.

The first read was The National Guard, DC landscaping and the great pursuit of lethality. In classic TACO Regime double standards, the Army Times points out what a big show Pete Hegseth made about the Army and ‘lethality’ back in December of 2024. First, the article points out that the national guard troops were authorized to be armed and use force “solely in response to an imminent threat,” according to a Guard statement. Then the article goes on to mock the use of these troops for landscaping duties, duties usually done by the National Parks Service but can’t be done because El TACO dismissed said NPS workers.

Great execution, Donnie boy!

Here’s the Times’ words to convey what’s going on:

Many guardsmen, however, were unaware the imminent threat posed would come in the form of unkempt flower beds and tree debris, their weapons akin to those wielded by an Anglo-Saxon fyrd under Alfred the Great.

But such is the reality for many of the 2,300 or so troops deployed to stem the “magnitude of the violent crime” in the nation’s capital, where threats of high-priced coffee, spandex-clad cyclists and more salmon pants than a Ralph Lauren factory loom around every pothole-riddled corner.

Various critics, meanwhile, have suggested the beautification work runs counter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s oft-repeated mission statement of bringing “a warfighting ethos back to the Pentagon.”

“Everything else that distracts [from lethality] shouldn’t be happening,” he told a reporter scrum back in December.

True warfighters instilled with the warfighting ethos, however, know that a warfighting ethos is only at its warfighting ethos-iest when warfighters are fighting a war on boredom.

The second Army Times article is Trump’s push for more troops in US cities at odds with crime stats. As many of us moored in facts and reality already noted, PINO TACO was sending in troops for a problem of violent crime that only exists in his brain and the MAGAheads who bow to him.

President Donald Trump has threatened to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, New York, Seattle, Baltimore, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, to fight what he says is runaway crime. Yet data shows most violent crime in those places and around the country has declined in recent years.

Homicides through the first six months of 2025 were down significantly compared to the same period in 2024, continuing a post-pandemic trend across the U.S.

Trump, who has already taken federal control of police in Washington, D.C., has maligned the six Democratic-run cities that all are in states that opposed him in 2024. But he hasn’t threatened sending in the Guard to any major cities in Republican-leaning states.

John Roman, a data expert who directs the Center on Public Safety & Justice at the University of Chicago, acknowledged violence in some urban neighborhoods has persisted for generations. But he said there’s no U.S. city where there “is really a crisis.”

“We’re at a remarkable moment in crime in the United States,” he said.

But these are facts. Truth. Both are those are alien to Trumpworld, where his crazy vision distorts reality and maligns history. Of course, as many point out, much of what he says and does now and forever is to distract us from other things, things which really worry him. Things like Donald Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and what the Epstein file might say about him.

Trump is also trying to distract We the People from things like Trump’s failing health, his flailing efforts to end wars or improve the economy, and his dim chances to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He’s going down fast.

I don’t think it’ll be fast enough for many.

2

Mundaz Wandering Political Thoughts

Peter Sage shared a guest post on his site. Peter is a regular liberal. Alan DeBoer is a wealthy Republican. DeBoer wrote the post with AI’s help.

I’m familiar with Alan DeBoer. As an Ashland resident, I’ve met him a few times. He always struck me as a smooth, smiling, and conniving businessman, typical of many of that ilk, furthering their own wealth while singing the right notes about democracy and the environment here in blue Ashlandia. He says he wants money out of politics but he supports politicians who make no moves to get money out of politics. He doesn’t think gun control can be done and supports Trump, who stands adamantly against gun control. In a 2022 Op-Ed piece, Alan DeBoer decried the state of our education system.

Education is not going in the right direction. Schools are separating students by beliefs. We have stopped teaching how to solve problems and suppress independent thinking while having less tolerance for opposing opinions. Shouldn’t we teach how to have a positive conversation while respecting different opinions?

Yet, he supports Trump. Trump, who champions a twisted form of Christianity while oppressing every other religion. DeBoer supports Trump even as Trump methodically attacks universities and colleges and dismantles the education system. DeBoer supports Trump even as Trump polarizes the voting body by viciously attacking anyone who disagrees with him, using the levers of government to suppress free speech and opposition. With Trump as their leader, the GOP is working hard to separate students by economic class and race through private vouchers. Trump tacitly supports this by not doing anything about it.

That is so Che Guevara, n’est pas?

Here is Sage’s post title for the DeBoer guest spot:

What if Trump isn’t Hitler?

What if he is more like Che Guevara, a revolutionary disrupter taking on entrenched elites on behalf of oppressed people?

I was simultaneously ready to howl with laughter at DeBoer’s incredibly inane premise, but sickened and disgusted. One DeBoer paragraph leaped out with its simplistic naiveite.

Decades from now, historians will look back and weigh not only Trump’s rhetoric but also his policies. Among these, his tax reform is likely to stand out. While critics often characterized it as a gift to corporations, the reality is that millions of lower- and middle-income households saw relief through reduced income tax rates, a doubled standard deduction, and expanded child tax credits. For working families, this meant more money in their paychecks and greater flexibility to support themselves — hardly the mark of a leader indifferent to ordinary citizens.

DeBoer’s piece brought out my Sarcastic Neurons. Why, sure, Alan, Trump is a liberator of ordinary citizens. That’s why he’s ignoring court rulings, right? Due process? That’s for the elites. Disappearing people off streets? That’s to make it better for the ‘oppressed’, right? Trying to end mail-in ballots, why that’s surely a good thing for the oppressed and democracy, isn’t it? Cause making it harder to vote and more difficult for your vote to be counted will clear the way for the oppressed. Trump is such a champion of the poor and oppressed, he’s cutting healthcare for them. Take that, elite evil doers!

And I’m absolutely sure that $200 child tax credit will go a long way to cope with rising prices that come from Trump’s combo of tariffs and trade wars.

Trump is whitewashing history. He and DeBoer must think that People of Color are part of the elites running things. Why, all those billionaires on the Trump’s cabinet are champions of the oppressed. That’s why they’re billionaires: they’re hoarding money to save oppressed people from having any. That’s ’cause these billionaires know that money is the root of all evil. They’re wealthy not for themselves but to save the rest.

That stuff about separation of church and state, and the idea that all people are created equal, all that’s just elitism offered by the original elitists, the nation’s founders. Yeah, I know, the founders were flawed individuals, too. Some of them had some damn good ideas, though, like protecting individual freedoms, instilling checks and balances to protect the government from itself, trying protect the nation from destruction that religions and bankers can cause. Trump’s actions are tearing down these protections. Alan, do you really think the oppressed will benefit from that?

Using troops against our own citizens is a clear Che Guevara move. Likewise, building new prisons like that pathetic Alligator Alcatraz in Florida. Trump makes fantastic claims about being a man of peace after he bombs another country and bloviates about ending ten wars without coherently explaining what conflicts or how he ended them. Meanwhile, he accused Ukraine of being the aggressor in their war with Russia, ignoring Russia’s attack and invasion, withheld funding from Ukraine for months, and hasn’t ended that war after boasting that he’d do in the first 24 hours of his administration.

DeBoer doesn’t address any of this behavior. Naturally, DeBoer says nothing about the growing inflation or the impact of the tariffs, or the cuts to the IRS, HHS, VA, Weather Service, or Parks Services, cuts which undermine the government’s ability to maintain and serve. DeBoer clearly views Trump’s activities through a narrow rose-colored prism that lets him see some things that Trump is doing as wonderful for the people, while filtering out all of the rest.

I don’t think that history will view Trump through that same prism.

0

Satyrdaz Theme Music

We are socked in with fog in Yachats. No blue sky or sunshine has made their whereabouts known. 57 F now, a high of 65 F has been proclaimed as an afternoon promise. All this is much different from yesterday. Guess we were getting spoiled and things needed to be changed.

We played rousing and enthusiastic Mexican Train last night. The domino game has us enthralled. I was leading until like four hands from the end. Then my friend surged ahead and beat me by a few points. Nevertheless, I was delighted with winning four rounds. Gave me such a high.

After discussing politics and health matters, “Reflections of My Life” from 1970 was brought up into the morning mental music stream by The Neurons. Marmalade wrote and performed the reflective soft rock song. The group had other hits but I never owned any of their albums.

I stayed hooked on those lines, “The world is a bad place, a terrible place to live, oh, but I don’t want to die.” Sums up a lot of the inherent conflict in our many attitudes about life, death, commerce, and politics.

We’re planning a road trip up the road to the aquarium and greater coast exploration. Breakfast is being finished. We’re talking about a friend’s recent fast-food visit. He went into order and encountered a machine asking him for his order. A voice announced it was ready. He picked it up from a racked cart. Never encountered a person, which bummed him. He then went through the drive-thru next time. One person was encountered, to accept payment. I shared my imagination’s output: robotic arms putting the order together in the back, delivering a bag of food to a conveyor belt that carries it out to the customer.

I’m moving on wings of coffee. Hope grace and peace find a way to carry you through the day. Cheers

1

Are You Ready?

Daily writing prompt
Create an emergency preparedness plan.
View all responses

I’ve already created emergency preparedness plans for our house. I almost felt compelled to.

First, I spent my life from 18 years old to over 38 years old in the U.S. Air Force. Almost all of those years were in command and control. My initial duties were to learn how to execute checklist and manage communications relating to disasters affecting my base and unit, and executing war plans as defined by our mission. Then I trained others in those procedures. As I advanced in rank, I gained the responsibilities to write and review the plans, operational procedures, and checklist for disaster preparedness and recovery, and taking care of business.

All that sprawled over into the rest of my life. No matter where I was stationed, overseas or in the U.S., there was always a chance for a war, riot, or natural disaster such as a tornado, hurricane or typhoon (cyclone), earthquake, flooding, wildfire, etc. So I wrote us plans and checklists for coping with that, printed them out, and reviewed them with my wife. When we lived in areas prone to those problems, the local authorities strongly encouraged you to have those things and be prepared, so we did. They reside in a desk drawer but copies are in both cars.

So that’s how I am. Prepared. A checklist dictates what we need to take. We have a go-bag sitting in the closet and a kennel ready for the cat. Three days of clothing is inside the bag. Blankets and old pillows are in another go bag. A little case sits by our meds, ready to be swept up and carried off. A large cardboard box sits in the garage, ready to be filled with food. We keep unopened jars of large peanut butter available for that, along with other foods, such as energy bars, instant coffee, tea, utensils (including a can opener), cat food and treats. Our important papers are in a fire-resistant strong box so we can pick that up and go. We have a case of one liter bottles of water on hand. We also have a dozen plastic gallon jugs ready to be filled and carted off. We’ve had to get ready to evacuate places a couple times, so we’ve practiced grabbing all those things. Besides the basics of AM/FM radio, cell phones and flashlights, we keep a solar powered energy brick charged and ready to go. Extra radio and flashlight batteries are kept in plastic bags beside the go bag in the coat closet between the foyer and the garage.

Are we ready? I hope so, but I know from going through these things, plans go awry. I prefer to keep my fingers crossed and hope that we never need to do these things. But just in case, I’m going to do my best to stay prepared.

Fingers crossed, you know?

3

A Little Perspective

Ever Wonder What It’s Like …?

I am a person who suffers from first world blues. Viktor Kravchuk’s insights about the war in Ukraine, lifted from Jill Dennison’s blog, helps me with an attitude adjustment about slow net speeds, poor customer service, terrible drivers, and writing difficulties. Mr. Kravhuk’s comments commend an attitude that is too often lost, that it’s easy to despair and give up, but what’s the point of that? Better to pick up and keep going.

1

Munda’s Wandering Political Thoughts

Trump wants a Peace Prize. I believe him worthy of winning an Ig Nobel Peace Prize this year.

As a man of peace, he has successfully orchestrated a roundup of violent people in the United States. These people were in the U.S. posing as farmworkers, housewives, day laborers, food plant workers, mothers, fathers, and children. Using the Trump branded ESP called TSP*, his minions swept up violent criminals who are illegally in the United States by using just the power of their nose to sniff out crime before it takes place. Most amazingly, with TSP, Trump’s ICE agents are capable of identifying child criminals just by their skin color. To buttress his need for Peace, Trump had the amazing Peace Confinement Base built in Florida. After befriending alligators, Trump trained the alligators to peacefully guard the Peace Confinement Base. Unfortunatly, evil opponents to Trump’s peace efforts use that fact to malign the place as “Alligator Alcatraz”.

Trump will do anything for peace. Searching for peace between Russia and Ukraine, he humbly employed his amazing skills at changing the past to show that Ukraine was the aggressor in that war and urged their leader to accept those new facts at any cost to win peace.

Trump’s third stake in the running for the Ig Noble Peace Prize is his use of America’s military force to launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran, bravely ignoring his own military intelligence’s insights and assessments of Iran to do so. In doing so, Trump modestly noted, “Might makes right, and we have the rightest military in the world.”

Finally, Trump deserves consideration for repetitive efforts to bring peace to others in the world by bringing them under his Umbrella of Peace**. This includes violently afflicted hellholes such as the barbarous and backwards New York City, the swamp of killing named Canada, the miasma of murder known as Greenland, and the Panama Canal.

Surely Trump’s words and behaviors have earned him the right to stand before the world and accept an Ig Noble Peace Prize.

Trump has won an Ig Nobel before, for his bold influence on medical science in 2020 after the COVID-19 pandemic began. He shared that prize with many others, though, who offered the same sort of impact on life in that trying period. I believe the time has come for D.J. Trump to stand alone and get recognition for his impact on peace.

Unfortunately, he will not win. The Ig Noble Prizes are satirical and made to make people laugh and think. There is at once too much and nothing to laugh about with Trump, and none of it is satirical.

But if he doesn’t win, surely a billionaire friend will create the Trump Peace Prize in his honor and make him the first recipient. Then they’ll need to retire the prize. Nobody else can ever be worthy. Unless they offer enough money.

*TSP: Trump Special Power

**Trump brand gold-plated Umbrella of Peace is available online for $25,000. Autographed editions are available for an additional $5,000. Order yours fast, as supplies are limited to the first 47 people. Made in China. Not subject to tariffs. Not available to Democrats or Liberals. All sales are final.

3

Munda’s Wandering Political Thoughts

If you have a brain, and some thinking skills, the full Trumpasy is all revealed. Just check out the Trump Regime’s actions. Look at the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’. Read again Project 2025.

  1. Redistribute wealth to the wealthy. They need it to ‘build the economy’. This is called trickle down economics. It has been decisively proven not to work.
  2. Start shredding the welfare net. Cut Medicaid. Force people to work more.
  3. Cut all assistance contributed by the Federal government to the states and local communities. Downtrodden existences lead to downtrodden morale. A sick people is a desperate people, and are more easily manipulated.
  4. De-construct the education system. An uneducatd population is more guillible. Indoctrinate young people into right wing values via vouchers and private schools.
  5. Manufacture and reinforce negative stereotypes of other citizens, people who ‘are different’, i.e., people who are not heterosexual and white. This is useful for blame games and distraction, and helps neuter political will.
  6. Weaponize ICE into a paramilitary force. While laws limit what the US military is authorized to do to citizens, it’s a more wide-open field with ICE. Under the guise of rounding up ‘illegal immigrants’, the Trump Regime are also undermining due process and the concepts of ‘innocent until proven guilty’. People are being disappeared as the right-wing social media machine provides cover by declaring that the Constitution isn’t meant to be applied to ‘non-citizens’.
  7. Establish concentration camps. The first one has been built in Florida, of course. Don’t be surprised if Texas eagerly builds one in the race to be patriotic by refusing others equality, rights, and freedom. Disappearing people and creating concentration camps stoke fears and can be used to threaten political opposition.
  8. Build a right-wing Supreme Court bias that’s willing to overlook history and precedence, one which will used flawed interpretations of the U.S. Constitution to empower the Executive Branch and wipe out the checks and balance system provided by three equal branches.
  9. Weaponize trade. Try to force manufacturing back to the United States, even though the raw materials are obtained elsewhere, and even though the capital investments needed for new factories are astronomical. This provides a false hope of new jobs; there will be new jobs but they won’t pay wages needed to live in this ever expensive land, forcing people to work more, no matter their health or situation. This will also increase people’s desperation to work and make money to pay for basic goods and services such as food and housing, as prices see tariff-based inflation bound upward.
  10. But — also cut limitations on child labor laws. Encourage poor poeple to have more children to provide a larger and cheaper work force.
  11. Cut or waive environmental laws and regulations to reduce the cost of building new manufacturing facilities.
  12. Nurture confusion among facts and distrust of the news media. Confusion helps the Regime maintain control by undermining grass root organizations’ ability to effectively organize and protest. It also allows the Regime to turn citizen against citizen in a cold war that favors the Trump Regime’s heavy hand.
  13. Distract, distract, distract. In this endeavor, natural disasters are your friend; they pull focus from the political arena. Reduce the Federal government’s effectiveness in predicting disasters and helping states and communities. Again, chaos, confusion, and low morale are useful for controlling and manipulating the population. As a bonus, when a natural disaster levels a region, it opens up land and opportunity to rebuild. People with next to nothing can be more easily induced to take less pay for bad jobs.
  14. Attack other nations; encourage aggression among other nations. Make the world a scarier place.

Yes, this is cynical. It’s not my thinking, but my interpretation of what the Trump Regime and the Republican-filled Greedy Ol’ Trump Party, also known as the GOTP, is doing. Show me I’m wrong. Point to Trump’s actions and demonstrate otherwise. Parse that OBBB for clues that this is not what the Trump Regime pursues.

Time will tell. It’s already told us a great deal in the first six months of 2025.

1

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑